The Three to Five Year Whale Watching Ban: For Conservation, or the Economy?

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With just 74 Orcas remaining in the waters off the coast of the State of Washington and neighbouring British Columbia, there is clearly a problem. As the Center for Whale research explains, “The Southern Resident Killer Whales (SRKW), or Orcas, are actually a large extended family, or clan, comprised of three pods: J, K, and L pods.

As of July 2018, the SRKW population totals 75 (editors note: this has since dropped to 74) whales: J Pod=23, K Pod=18, L Pod=34.”

Photo by Frank Busch

WHAT IS EXECUTIVE ORDER 18-02?

We need to do everything we can to help ensure the future of these great animals and the State of Washington, appeared to take a great stride in March 2018.

The Executive Order, signed by The State of Washington Governor Jay Inslee, detailed that “The Task Force was charged with preparing a comprehensive report and recommendations for recovering Southern Residents, with a full draft due by September 24, 2018, and a final report by November 16, 2018”. The “Executive Order 18-02: Southern Resident Killer Whale and Recovery Task Force” can be found in full here.

The task force met that deadline, and just a couple of days ago, Governor Jay Inslee’s team voted to recommend a three to five-year moratorium on commercial whale watching for Southern Resident killer whales.

The knee jerk reaction is that this appears to be great news. If whale watching boats are causing a problem, then this is an important move to ensure their survival. However, there is more to this story and we start with the FAQ section of the Pacific Whale Watching Association’s website, where a simple questions is asked, but there is far from a straightforward answer.

“There’s no evidence that whale watching is a significant factor in their decline. If that were the case, transient killer whales and humpback whales wouldn’t be doing so well in the same environment. Scientific studies on stress hormones in the southern residents show that when there’s sufficient food, boat noise and disturbance have a low effect. But when chinook salmon are scarce, as they are now year after year, and the whales have to work longer and harder to find what little food there is, any noise disturbance undoubtedly has a greater effect.”

This passage alludes to the depth that we will need to go into to establish whether this recommendation really makes that much sense.

Contrary to the Pacific Whale Watching Association’s answer, Donna Sandstrom, Director of The Whale Trail, but poignantly also a member of the Orca Task Force that has made the recommendation which led to the executive order, offered another perspective entitled “Cut the toxins and boat noise, and boost salmon, so orcas can survive“. Within this article, published in The Seattle Times, Donna agrees that the “best available science shows that to recover the orcas we must both increase the amount of salmon” but that a decrease in the amount of noise is necessary too. Within the same article a study is referenced, “that shows that the southern residents lose 5.5 hours of foraging time each day due to noise and disturbance from commercial vessels and whale-watching boats specifically”.

Elsewhere, Elizabeth May, the leader of the Green Party of Canada tweeted.

With this Executive Order being passed in the State of Washington, you might be asking yourself why this might influence Canadian ports and Whale watching companies? As far as we’re aware at The Outdoor Journal, there are not any planned Canadian recommendations, legislation or any kind of moratorium.

Brett Soberg, who runs Eagle Wing tours but also speaks on behalf of British Columbia’s whale watching industry told Global News that “The whale-watching industry is a trans-national. Canadian companies are regularly in American waters tracking animals. If Washington state bans viewing it will have an impact on how Canadian tour operators conduct their business, but there are very few details about what could happen. This really surprised us.”

THE DAMS AND LACK OF SALMON, THE BOATS, OR BOTH?

“Honesty was crushed by politics and vested interests, even within agencies whose responsibility it is to manage natural resources sustainably.”

These are the words of Ken Balcomb, executive director of the Center for Whale Research. These feelings are echoed elsewhere by many activists who feel that this decision to target commercial whale watchers is skirting the key issue of dams cutting off the Orca’s food supply. Put simply, Salmon cannot make their way down the rivers due to huge dams that “produce an average of 1,000 megawatts of power a year, or about 5 percent of electricity generated in the Pacific Northwest, and account for about 12 percent of BPA’s power“, according to K5 news. A huge amount of power, that has a huge amount of commercial and therefore political value too.

“they overwhelmingly rely on Chinook salmon”

National Geographic published an article that spells out the importance of Salmon to the SRKW’s in their article “How Killer Whales Went from Hated, to Adored, to Endangered”. Nat Geo explain that “What’s hurting them is, above all, the lack of available prey” and that “Southern Residents don’t just rely primarily on Chinook salmon; they overwhelmingly rely on Chinook salmon“.

Brett Soberg, told Global News that “It’s pretty clear food scarcity, not noise from boats that is the biggest concern to the southern residents”. The situation does appear bizarre, that a few whale watching boats are being deemed an issue, whilst huge tankers and all the pleasure boats are not considered to be a more significant concern.

Andrew Trites, of the University of British Columbia, where he is the Director of UBC’s Marine Mammal Research Unit, supported this observation, when he told CTV news that “Nothing’s being talked about for all the small pleasure boaters that are roaring around“. Andrew continues to explain that “We don’t ever talk about what’s happened to the food supply… The irony is that the whale-watching industry that takes out many, many people in each boat, they know the whales better than anybody else“. Elsewhere, Mark Malleson, the Prince of Whales, also told CTV that “Many of us are taking photographs, collecting data, so a huge attribute for the scientific community“.

The Orca Behaviour Institute has also argued that commercial whale watching should not be be considered a huge problem in comparison barge traffic and commercial fishing boats.

FURTHER DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

There are further explanations as to why the population of Southern Resident Killer Whales is dwindling. For many years, they were taken out of their natural habitats to be kept in captivity. It all started in the 60’s with Ted Griffin, a well known personality in Seattle as the founder of the Seattle Marine Aquarium. Ted brought the SRKW’s to his park, and as far as we know, became the first person to swim with one. Ted’s impact on the SRKW’s really solidified over coming years, as he went on to repeat this again and again, capturing dozens in order to satisfy the demand from aquariums around the world.

Jenny Atkinson of the Whale Museum told Advocacy for Animals, that “Originally, the main threat that everybody believes is what really caused this population decline was that capture era, where more than 50 individuals were taken out of this population for the captive industry.” Due to ease of transportation, it was often the smaller Whales that were taken, this meant that two generations of Southern Resident’s were removed from the oceans. Not only did this leave the pods with the obvious problem, but also a reduction in diversity within the gene pool. Ted’s legacy is that of a lasting threat to the existence of Southern Resident Killer Whales.

There are also curious examples from other geographic regions, that it’s important to take note of. The Government of Canada note that the “Northern Resident population has grown since the 1970s. Since 2002, the population has experienced an average annual growth rate of 2.9%. In 2017, the population numbered 309 individuals. However, conservation concerns exist for this population, given its small size and slow growth rate.” In the 1970’s, the population stood at 120, so there has clearly been a huge improvement in an area so close to the waters frequented by the Southern Residents.

Why is this? How can the difference be so big between the Northern and Southern Residents? Lance Barrett-Lennard, director of the marine mammal program at the Vancouver Aquarium told the Haida Gwaii Observer that whilst the growth has been encouraging “They took a bit of a downturn in the late 1990s, during a time when chinook salmon were particularly scarce in some poor salmon years”. It’s a very interesting observation, and links can surely be drawn with the issues that the SRKW’s face. In times where the Salmon is plentiful the Northern Resident population has grown substantially.

AN ATTEMPT TO DRAW CONCLUSIONS

This is clearly a complex issue, and it’s very difficult to draw clear conclusions. However, it’s obvious that most people who understand the situation and Orca’s better than anybody agree that food scarcity is the main issue. This is backed up by the success of the Northern Residents, who have had a sufficient source of food for a sustained period.

The resolution to conserving the Southern Residents means increasing salmon populations, but to do so would require drastic measures. A good example would be the removal of dams on the Snake River, which would ensure that greater numbers would be within range of the Orca’s. However, the removal of dams on the Snake River could mean a detrimental effect on the economy, a move that appears unlikely, even if it is in the face of huge environmental importance. Instead, recommendations to skirt this issue, and target whale watching tours is likely to continue, so that politicians can be seen to be doing something whilst protecting the economy over the conservation.

WRITTEN BY

Clouds of dust rose behind the wheels of the pickup truck as we hurtled over the back road in Palo Verde, El Salvador. When we got to the stone-paved part of the road, the driver slowed as the truck heaved up and down with the uneven terrain. Riding in the back bed of the truck, Ruben (not his real name) and I talked while we held on tight, sitting on sacks of dried beans that he was taking to market.

“It doesn’t come out right,” he said, “it just doesn’t pay anymore to work the land. I take out a loan for seed, and then I can’t count on making it back to pay off my debt.”

Ruben told me then, for the first time, that he planned to save up his money to migrate out of El Salvador. His story is playing out across Central America among many migrants and would-be migrants.

When I spoke with Ruben, it was 2017, nearly 20 years after I had first spent time in his community, a coffee cooperative in El Salvador’s central highlands founded in the 1990s. Over those two decades, the cooperative’s hopes and dreams of a sustainable livelihood producing coffee for a global market have been dashed.

Rising global temperatures, the spread of crop disease and extreme weather events have made coffee harvests unreliable in places like El Salvador. On top of that, market prices are unpredictable.

In the back of the pickup truck that day, we talked about gangs too. There was increasing criminal activity in the town nearby, and some young people in the town were being harassed and recruited. But this was a relatively new issue for the community, layered on top of the persistent problem of the ecological crisis.

As a cultural anthropologist who studies factors of displacement in El Salvador, I see how Ruben’s situation is reflective of a much broader global phenomenon of people leaving their homes, directly or indirectly due to climate change and the degradation of their local ecosystem. And as environmental conditions are projected to get worse under current trends, this raises unresolved legal questions on the status and security of people like Ruben and his family.

Land and livelihood

Migration from Central America has gotten a lot of attention these days, including the famous migrant caravans. But much of it focuses on the way migrants from this region – especially El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras – are driven out by gang violence, corruption and political upheaval.

The migrant exodus from Central America includes many people impacted by climate change, although other factors play a part as well.

The link between environmental instability and emigration from the region became apparent in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Earthquakes and hurricanes, especially Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and its aftermath, were ravaging parts of Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

Many people from El Salvador and Honduras lived in the U.S. at the time, and the Bush administration granted them Temporary Protected Status. In this way, the government of the United States recognized the inhumanity of sending people back to places struggling with ecological disaster.

In the years since those events, both rapid-onset and long-term environmental crises continue to displace people from their homes worldwide. Studies show that displacement often happens indirectly through the impact of climate change on agricultural livelihoods, with some areas pressured more than others. But some are more dramatic: Both Honduras and Nicaragua are among the top 10 countries most impacted by extreme weather events between 1998 and 2017.

Compounding factor

These trends have led experts at the World Bank to claim that around 2 million people are likely to be displaced from Central America by the year 2050 due to factors related to climate change. Of course, it’s hard to tease out the “push factor” of climate change from all of the other reasons that people need to leave. And unfortunately, these phenomena interact and tend to exacerbate each other.

Scholars are working hard to assess the scale of the problem and study ways people can adapt. But the problem is challenging. The number of displaced could be even higher – up to almost 4 million – if regional development does not shift to more climate-friendly and inclusive models of agriculture.

People who emigrate from Central America may not always fully realize the role climate change plays in their movement, or think of it as the final trigger given all the other reasons they have to flee. But they know that the crops fail too often, and it’s harder to get clean water than it used to be.

Environmental factors are playing more and more of a role in Central Americans’ decisions to leave home.

Seeking a protected status

Ruben recently contacted me to ask for a reference to a good immigration lawyer. He and his daughter are now in the United States and have an upcoming hearing to determine their status.

Just as he predicted a few years ago, Ruben couldn’t make a living in El Salvador. But he may find it hard to live in the U.S. too, given the mismatch between refugee law and current factors causing displacement.

For several years now, scholars and legal advocates have been asking how to respond to people displaced by environmental conditions. Do existing models of humanitarian response and resettlement work for this new population? Could such persons be recognized as in need of protection under international law, similar to political refugees?

Among the most complicated political questions is who should step up to deal with the harms of climate change, considering that wealthier countries pollute more but are often shielded from the worst effects. How can responsibility be assigned, and more importantly, what is to be done?

In the absence of coordinated action on the part of the global community to mitigate ecological instability and recognize the plight of displaced people, there’s a risk of what some have called “climate apartheid.” In this scenario – climate change combined with closed borders and few migration pathways – millions of people would be forced to choose between increasingly insecure livelihoods and the perils of unauthorized migration.